I just discovered Oxen this week and it seems like a great idea, on paper. So I may be wrong about all this, which is why I’m posting this in the hopes of being corrected.
My impressions of the Oxen onion network and crypto scheme;
* It costs between ~2850-11000 USD to run a node (at time of writing).
* That is payed in dollars to the early adopters of Oxen, and you receive the equivalent in Oxen coin.
* You as a node operator are then payed 152USD/month in Oxen for running the node.
* This is meant as a protection for Sybil attacks against the onion network by raising the threshold for node operators.
* At this time of writing I am not aware of any market using the Oxen coins.
* I believe each node also has to participate in validating transactions in the blockchain, there is no way to just donate bandwidth to the onion network. (could be wrong, docs were not clear)
* So if the number of transactions goes up each node will need to scale up along with the blockchain?
* But then on the other hand, if the number of transactions forces the nodes to scale up, that means there is an actual market trading in Oxen and that actually gives the crypto coins some real value.
* So at this point in time you’re essentially giving 11000 dollars to the founders of Oxen and their early adopters, in the hopes that it will some day find a market and attain value IRL.
* Or you’re donating 11000 USD because you believe in their onion network so much.